EVEN IN ONE of the bloodiest years on the frontier—1860—the killing of Martha Sherman stood out. Maybe it was because she had been gang-raped and tortured while she was pregnant. Maybe it was because of her dead baby or because the precise, horrific details of what happened to her, which she herself related in the few days she lived, spread so quickly in Parker, Jack, and other counties. Whatever the case, in the days following the Sherman raid, all hell broke loose. People panicked. They fled the frontier as fast as they could. “The indications are,” wrote twenty-eight-year-old schoolteacher Jonathan Hamilton Baker in his diary on November 28, “that our county will soon be depopulated.”¹ Caravans were moving. The counties were emptying. Within days of the raid there were a hundred deserted farms in the area. Most of the people west of Weatherford had retreated eastward, leaving, in the words of one rancher, “the extreme frontier post.”²
Yet not everyone was leaving. A twenty-four-year-old named Charles Goodnight, destined to become one of the most famous cattlemen in Texas and one of the originators of the great cattle drives, rode through the chill, rainy night, recruiting a posse to pursue the raiders. He found eight willing men who met the next morning at the house of an old man named Isaac Lynn, whose daughter and son-in-law had recently been brutally murdered by Comanches. When Goodnight entered the house, he found Lynn “sitting before a large log fire in the old-fashioned fireplace, with a long, forked dogwood stick, on which was an Indian scalp, thoroughly salted. The hair was tucked inside. As he turned it carefully over the fire, the grease oozed out of it. . . . He looked back over his shoulder, bade me good morning, and then turned to his work of roasting the scalp. I do not think I ever saw so sad a face.” Since his daughter’s death he had become a collector of scalps and asked people to bring him any they had. He roasted them so they wouldn’t spoil. Like so many people on the bleeding frontier, he was drowning in hatred and grief.³
Goodnight and his men left immediately to track Peta Nocona’s raiders. Because the Indians were traveling with one hundred fifty stolen horses, this was easily done. The Comanches, who normally took pains to avoid being tracked, scattering their herds when they came to gravel, rock, or hard ground, were soon well beyond where white men had ever followed them before. And so they had stopped taking precautions and, in Goodnight’s words, “were driving in a body.” Goodnight and his party had traveled at least one hundred twenty miles across open prairies and swift, cold rivers. It had rained incessantly. They were without food or bedding, and now they realized they were approaching a camp with a large number of Indians, many more than had been with Peta Nocona’s raiders. This was Nautdah’s village on Mule Creek, the great supply depot and clearinghouse for the frontier raids. Satisfied that they knew where the Indians had gone, and aware that they had no chance against so many of them, Goodnight and his trackers turned back.⁴
A full-scale expedition was quickly mounted. By the time it coalesced at Fort Belknap on December 13, it consisted of forty Rangers, twenty-one army soldiers from the Second Cavalry at Fort Cooper, and some seventy local volunteers, including Goodnight as scout. They were commanded by twenty-three-year-old Sul Ross, the wiry, ambitious young man who had recruited Indian scouts for the Van Dorn expedition while still an undergraduate at Wesleyan University in Florence, Alabama. Ross had fought bravely at the Battle of Antelope Hills and had been gravely wounded and had thus made a name for himself. He had been chosen personally by Governor Sam Houston to replace the incompetent and love-struck Middleton Johnson, under whom Ross had served. Ross’s commission would turn out to be a brilliant move for both men and convince people that Houston was doing something about the Comanche problem. Ross would use it as the springboard to a dazzling career. He later became the youngest general in the Confederacy, a popular two-term governor of Texas, and president of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas (now Texas A&M). For the moment, plenty of people hated him, especially John Baylor’s rabble-rousers, who saw him as an Indian sympathizer and threatened to hang him if they found him. Ross himself had higher purposes. In a letter written later that contained more than a hint of vainglory, he wrote: “I determined to make a desperate attempt to curb the insolence of these implacable enemies of Texas. . . . I planned to accomplish this by following them into their fastness and carry the war into their own homes where this tribe, the most inveterate raiders on the border, retired with their captives and booty to their wild haunts amid the hills and valleys of the beautiful Canadian and Pease rivers.”⁵ One can almost hear the campaign speeches and slogans stirring in his brain.
The cavalcade headed northwest in bitter cold, over mesquite prairies scarred by ravines and limestone ridges. This was open country, dun-colored and wintry. The young schoolteacher Baker, who joined the volunteers, later recalled “poor prairie uplands with tolerably good valleys along the creeks where the grass was fine. There was no timber along our route today except small hackberries in the valleys and scrubby mesquite on the prairies.”⁶ They saw thousands of buffalo. The water of the Big Wichita and Pease rivers was “salty and gyppy,” and tasted awful. At night there were heavy frosts; the men wrapped themselves in blankets and buffalo robes and shivered before small fires. They crossed rivers in the tracks of the buffalo, to avoid quicksand.⁷ On December 17 came rain, dense fog, and briefly warmer air. On December 18 there were thunderstorms in the night. The next morning Goodnight found a pillow slip with a little girl’s belt and Martha Sherman’s Bible in it. Why had the Indians made a point of taking the Bible? According to Goodnight, Comanche shields, made of two layers of the toughest rawhide from the neck of a buffalo and hardened in fire, were almost invulnerable to bullets when stuffed with paper. When Comanches robbed houses they invariably took all the books they could find.⁸
On December 19, the Rangers and soldiers from the Second Cavalry, riding out ahead of the volunteers in a long valley bounded by a range of sand hills, spotted the Indian camp Charles Goodnight and his scouts had seen. They were lucky: A blustery norther had come up, of the sort the plains were famous for, and the soldiers’ position was concealed by blowing clouds of sand.⁹ There were not many Indians in the camp; the five hundred that Goodnight had theorized were no longer there. The few they could see were packing horses and mules and preparing to leave, unaware of the approach of the white men. Seeing this, Ross ordered the army sergeant to circle around to the other side of the camp, to block the Indians’ retreat.
Then he and his sixty men attacked what were later determined to be fifteen Indians. Many of the latter were killed before they even picked up weapons. Others fled into the jaws of the trap and were cut down there. Once among them, the men realized that most of the occupants of the camp were women. There were a few old men, too, and a few warriors. In Goodnight’s account, the Rangers spared most, but not all, of the women they encountered. The federal troops, meanwhile, killed everyone they encountered, regardless of sex. As Goodnight described it:
The Sergeant and his men [from the Second Cavalry] fell in behind on the squaws, six or eight in number, who never got across the first bend of the creek. They were so heavily loaded with meat, tent poles and camp equipage that their horses could not run. We supposed they had about a thousand pounds of buffalo meat in various stages of curing. The sergeant and his men killed every one of them, nearly in a pile.¹⁰
The fight lasted only a few minutes and was more of a butchery than a pitched battle. Participants remembered some interesting details. The few warriors in the camp used their horses for breastworks, standing behind them when they were on their feet, and lying down behind them after they were shot down.¹¹ In the midst of the struggle, the white soldiers found themselves under attack from fifteen or so dogs from the Indian camp, who tried valiantly to defend their Indian masters. Almost all were shot and killed.
The battle ended in a brief running fight. Ross and Lieutenant Tom Kelliheir rode in pursuit of the last three Indians, who were mounted on two horses. After a mile, they caught up with the single Indian, who rode a splendid iron-gray stallion. Ross was about to shoot when the Comanche, who he could now see was carrying a small child, reined in the horse and, depending on which version you believe, either opened her robe to show her breasts, or cried “Americano! Americano!” She may have done both. In any case, her ploy worked: Ross did not shoot. He ordered Kelliheir to stay with her and the child while Ross took off after the other two riders. He soon caught them and fired his army Colt, hitting the rear rider, who also turned out to be a woman. As she fell, she dragged the main rider to the ground with her. He was a large man, fully armed. From his earlier behavior and the way he had barked commands, Ross had identified him as the main chief, and he looked the part. He was nude to the waist, his body streaked with bright pigments. He wore two eagle plumes in his hair, a disk of beaten gold around his neck embossed with a turtle, broad gold bands on his upper arms, and fawn-skin leggings trimmed out with scalplocks.¹² He managed to land on his feet, seized his bow, and loosed several arrows. The following is Ross’s account of what happened next:
[M]y horse, running at full speed, was very nearly up on top of [the man] when he was struck with an arrow which caused him to begin pitching or bucking, and it was with great difficulty that I kept my saddle, and in the meantime narrowly escaped several arrows coming in quick succession from the chief’s bow. . . . He would have killed me but for a random shot from my pistol, which broke his right arm at the elbow, completely disabling him. My horse then became quiet, and I shot the chief twice through the body, whereupon he deliberately walked to a small tree, the only one in sight, and leaning against it began to sing a wild, weird song. . . . As he seemed to prefer death to life, I directed the Mexican boy to end his misery by a charge of buckshot.¹³
Other accounts suggest a slightly more complex drama, in which Ross and the chief conversed through an interpreter, the chief insisting that “when I am dead I will surrender but not before” and even trying to throw a spear at Ross with his good arm. Either way, the Indian was soon dead. A man named Anton Martinez, Ross’s manservant who had been a child captive of the Comanches—and who said he had been a slave in Peta Nocona’s own family—identified him as Peta Nocona. The final tally: twelve Indians dead, three captured. The third was a nine-year-old Comanche boy. The loss to the Comanches, who were hunkering down into their winter camps, was stunning: sixty-nine pack-mule loads of buffalo meat—something more than fifteen thousand pounds of it—and three hundred seventy horses.¹⁴
Now Ross rode back to the place where Kelliheir held the woman and her child captive. The woman was filthy, covered with dirt and grease from handling so much bloody buffalo meat. But to Ross’s astonishment he noticed that she had blue eyes. And he saw that under the grime her short-cropped hair was lighter in color than Indian black. She was white. Not quite believing what they had found, they took her back to what was left of her village, which the soldiers were busily looting. They were also scalping the dead Indians, men and women alike. By now scalping was the common practice on both sides. Since two men claimed the scalp of Peta Nocona, they decided to split it into two parts.¹⁵
The “white squaw” was then taken back to where Peta Nocona had been killed. She wept and wailed over his body. The soldiers did not let her stay there. They brought her to the main battlefield, where she was allowed to walk among the mutilated dead, carrying her child. She muttered in Comanche as she went, and wailed loudly only when she came to one young warrior who had white features. When Martinez, who spoke Comanche, asked her who he was, the woman replied cryptically, “He’s my boy, and he’s not my boy.” She later explained that he was the son of another white girl who had been captured by the Comanches and married an Indian. She had died but had asked Nautdah to look after the boy as though he were her own son.
She then told the Mexican how she had come to be there. In Ranger Frank Gholson’s account, she was with her two boys—whom the translator identified as Quanah and “Grassnut”—when the Rangers attacked. They fled, along with other women and children. “After I had gone some distance,” she told Martinez, “I missed both of my boys. I came back in search of them, coming as near the battle as I could. In this way I was caught. I am greatly distressed about my boys. I fear they are killed.”¹⁶ Ross, whose men had killed no one of that description, assured her that they were alive. She continued to weep. This was, after all, the second time in her life that she had seen people close to her massacred and scalped. The second time she had been taken captive by an alien culture whose language she did not speak.
Through Martinez, she told Ross that she remembered that her father had been killed in a battle long ago and that she and her brother had been captured. That and other details convinced Ross that she might be “the long lost Cynthia Ann Parker.” With that, she stopped talking. According to Gholson, she also “gave them a lot of trouble trying to escape.” At some point Jonathan Baker noticed a tiny, elaborately beaded moccasin on the ground. He picked it up and was looking at it when he noticed that Nautdah was watching him closely. He then realized that the child was missing a shoe. The little girl toddled over to him and he gave her the moccasin.¹⁷ Nautdah lived a hard life, but she had found the time and energy to make this exquisite little shoe. The next day the men burned everything they could not carry, and rode out.
They took her back to Fort Belknap, and thence to Fort Cooper, where she was delivered into the care of the captain’s wife. A Ranger named A. B. Mason, who accompanied her on that trip, recalled that after she arrived, she “sat for a time immovable, lost in profound meditation, oblivious to everything by which she was surrounded, ever and anon convulsed as it were by some powerful emotion which she struggled to suppress.”¹⁸ Mason wrote a version of what Cynthia Ann told officials at Fort Cooper, in the February 5, 1861, issue of the Galveston Civilian. His piece was undoubtedly edited, but this is how he quoted her:
I remember when I was a little girl, being a long time at the house with a picket fence all around; one day some Indians came to the house. They had a white rag on a stick. My father went out to talk to them, they surrounded and killed him, then many other Indians came and fought at the house; several whites were killed; my mother and her four children were taken prisoner; in the evening mother and two of her children were retaken by a white man. My brother died among the Indians of smallpox, I lived with the Indians north of Santa Fe. I have three children.¹⁹
She was wrong about her father talking to the Indians—it was her uncle Benjamin. And she was wrong about her brother John dying of smallpox; he was ransomed back to his family in September 1842. But her memory was extremely accurate about everything else. She may have been confused by the fury of the raid, but she remembered it quite clearly. She remembered watching her father die.
Ross sent immediately for Cynthia Ann’s uncle Isaac Parker. The women of Fort Cooper, meanwhile, decided to clean the filthy woman up, an enterprise that offered some comic relief amid the tragedy. They found some clothes for her, then got “an old negro mammy” to scrub her down with soap and hot water. Then they combed her hair and let her look at herself in the mirror. “She submitted to all this willingly enough, apparently,” wrote Gholson in his memoir, “until she got a good opportunity to get out the door of the place. When this opportunity occurred she made a dive for the door and got past the negro mammy.” She then headed for her tent, which was two or three hundred yards away, tearing her clothes off as she ran until she had almost nothing on, followed by the mammy frantically waving a washcloth as three bewildered army wives looked on and the child toddled along after them “with nobody paying much attention to her.”²⁰ Nautdah reached her tent, where she managed to find and put on some Comanche clothing. After that, the army wives gave up trying to pretty her up.
When Isaac Parker arrived, the captive was seated on a pine box with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands. She paid no attention to the assembled men until Parker spoke her name. With that, she stood, looked directly at him, patted her breast and said “Me Cincee Ann.” She repeated it, then resumed her seat. She agreed to answer questions about the raid on Parker’s Fort. She got some of the details wrong, but she remembered correctly that there were five captives, two grown women and three children. Then she was asked to describe Parker’s Fort. She responded by using a stick to draw an outline, using dots and dashes. She then drank from the canteen and dribbled water to round out the portrait, which included the stream that ran behind the fort. “Gentlemen,” Isaac Parker said, “I actually could not make as good a picture of the old fort as she has made.”²¹
- • •
The Battle of Pease River, as this very small skirmish came to be known rather grandiosely, has long been regarded by Texans as a major historical event. The return of the legendary white squaw offered what was to whites a completely satisfying ending to the great epic tale. Poor Cynthia Ann, the girl who had descended into pagan savagery, was back at last in the arms of her loving and God-fearing family. For the next century, the amazing tale of Cynthia Ann Parker’s Comanche captivity would be taught to schoolchildren in Texas.
There were some interesting sequels to the battle, as well, with enormous implications for the future of the Comanche tribe. Quanah and his brother survived it. After the fight Goodnight realized that two Indians had left on horseback. The young Ranger and ten scouts tracked them to a Comanche camp in the panhandle. Though Goodnight never learned their identity, the riders were almost certainly Quanah and Peanuts.²² The other child involved in the fight, the nine-year-old Comanche boy, was adopted by Sul Ross and his wife. They named him Pease. He was General Ross’s horse tender in 135 civil war engagements, married a former slave, became a respectable citizen of Waco, and died in 1883.²³
The fight also came to be seen, incorrectly, as the turning point in the war against the Comanches. “Thus was fought the great battle of Pease River,” intoned one of the breathless historical accounts of the day, “with the great Comanche chief, Peta Nocona, with a strong force on one side and the brave Captain Ross with sixty Rangers on the other. In the fight the greater part of the warriors were killed, and such a victory never before had been gained over these Comanches.”²⁴ In Ross’s own description, the battle takes on nearly mythic proportions. “The fruits of this important victory can never be computed in dollars and cents,” he wrote later. “The great Comanche confederacy was forever broken, the blow was decisive, their illustrious chief slept with his fathers and with him were most of his doughty warriors.”²⁵
This was utter nonsense. Comanche raids in 1864, to take just one year, were the worst in history; 1871 and 1872 were bad years, too. The U.S. Army sent three thousand soldiers against the Comanches in 1874, the largest army ever sent to hunt down hostile Indians. Though Ross had shown great personal courage in his hand-to-hand combat with Peta Nocona, the Indian foes in the Battle of Pease River were mostly women who were shot down while trying to escape on heavily laden horses. “I was in the Pease River fight,” wrote H. B. Rogers in a memoir, “but I am not very proud of it. That was not a battle at all, but just a killing of squaws. One or two bucks and 16 squaws were killed. The Indians were getting ready to leave when we came upon them.”²⁶
In the weeks and months that followed, the “battle” received wide coverage in Texas newspapers. None of them bothered to mention who the victims were. Considering the anti-Indian hysteria of the moment, it is unlikely that anyone really cared. What is interesting was the virtually universal belief among Texans at the time that Sul Ross, the hero of the battle and the future governor, had saved the poor, unfortunate Cynthia Ann Parker from an ugly fate. That belief would color the histories for a long, long time.
- • •
We will never know how Cynthia Ann Parker felt in the weeks and months after her capture by Sul Ross. There are so few comparable events in American history. But it was painfully apparent from the earliest days that the real tragedy in her life was not her first captivity but her second. White men never quite grasped this. The event that destroyed her life was not the raid at Parker’s Fort in 1836 but her miraculous and much-celebrated “rescue” at Mule Creek in 1860. The latter killed her husband, separated her forever from her beloved sons, and deposited her in a culture where she was more a true captive than she had ever been with the Comanches. In the moments before Ross’s raid, she had been quite as primitive as any other Plains Indian; packing thousands of pounds of buffalo meat onto mules, covered from head to toe in blood and grease, literally immersed in this elemental world that never quite left the Stone Age—a world of ceaseless toil, hunger, constant war, and early death. But also of pure magic, of beaver ceremonies and eagle dances, of spirits that inhabited springs, trees, rocks, turtles, and crows; a place where people danced all night and sang bear medicine songs, where wolf medicine made a person invulnerable to bullets, dream visions dictated tribal policy, and ghosts were alive in the wind. On grassy plains and timbered river bottoms from Kansas to Texas, Cynthia Ann—Nautdah—had drifted in the mystical cycles of the seasons, living in that random, terrifying, bloody, and intensely alive place where nature and divinity became one.
And then, suddenly, all of it disappeared. Instead of Stone Age camps aswirl in magic and taboo and scented smoke from mesquite lodge fires, she found herself sitting on taffeta chairs in drawing rooms on the outer margins of the Industrial Revolution, being interrogated by polite uncomprehending white men who believed in a single God and in a supremely rational universe where everything could be explained. This new culture was every bit as alien as the one she confronted after the attack on Parker’s Fort. It was as though she had walked yet again through a door into another world, quite as complete as the one she had left and, in all of its mystifying details, completely different.
Isaac Parker quickly satisfied himself that the woman Ross had captured was his long-lost niece Cynthia Ann. He decided immediately that he would take her and her daughter, Prairie Flower, back home with him to Birdville (now Haltom City), just north of Fort Worth. Both of her parents were dead. Silas had of course perished in the raid on Parker’s Fort. Her mother, Lucy, had died in 1852 after a life filled with bad marriages (three after Silas), poor health, and a brutal five-year legal battle over her husband’s estate.²⁷ Cynthia Ann’s brother Silas Jr. and sister, Orlena, having survived a rough childhood—Cynthia Ann, ironically, probably had a better life—were married and living in Texas. But it was Silas’s brother Isaac who decided to take his niece in. (Cynthia Ann’s uncle James, the old searcher, was still alive but curiously absent in all of this; perhaps he gave up when he heard that she did not want to be rescued.)
They soon departed, accompanied by the former Comanche captive Anton Martinez, who acted as interpreter, along with two Rangers. They stopped on the way at Fort Belknap, where a more successful effort was made to clean the mother and daughter up, and where Prairie Flower played happily with other children. She was by all accounts a bumptious and “sprightly” child. She was dark-skinned and strikingly pretty. Everyone liked her. Cynthia Ann herself was sturdily built, with short-cropped, medium brown hair; wide-set, striking light-blue eyes; and a mouth that seemed set in anger, or resignation, or both. She was not pretty, nor was she especially unattractive; in calico she looked in most ways like a typical Anglo pioneer woman of the day, a bit stout and rather more worn-looking than her urban counterparts at a comparable age. She was also, recognizably, a Parker. One account put her at five feet seven inches and one hundred forty pounds, which would have made her a giant among Comanche women. She and her tall, muscular husband must have cut quite a figure in Comanche camps, just as her son Quanah would later on.
They passed through Weatherford—the seat of Parker County, where the worst of Peta Nocona’s raids had taken place—and then stopped in Fort Worth, where Cynthia Ann became an instant celebrity. It is not known why the travelers stopped here. Some accounts say it was to have a photograph taken, but the first known photograph of her—a tintype, actually—was not taken until a month later in Austin.²⁸ Whatever the reason, her arrival caused a great commotion as residents of Tarrant County (who totaled 6,020 that year) clamored to see the famous captive and her child. Her arrival was considered such an important event that the local children were let out of school. They came in groups to gawk at the terrified captives, who were on display in front of a general store in downtown Fort Worth. It was a sort of freak show: Cynthia Ann was bound with rope and set out atop a large box so that everyone could see her. One can only wonder what role her uncle Isaac, politician that he was, played in it. According to one witness:
She was not dressed in Indian costume but wore a torn calico dress. Her hair was bronzed by the sun. Her face was tanned, and she made a pathetic figure as she stood there, viewing the crowds that swarmed about her. The tears were streaming down her face, and she was muttering in the Indian language.²⁹
Texans could not get enough of her. There were many newspaper accounts of her return, all of which were uniformly obsessed with the idea that a pretty little nine-year-old white girl from a devout Baptist family had been transformed into a pagan savage who had mated with a redskin and borne his children and forgotten her mother tongue. She was thus, according to the morals of the day, grotesquely compromised. She had forsaken the virtues of Christianity for the wanton immorality of the Indian. That was the attraction. And all the stories assumed that everything she had done had been forced upon her. That she had suffered grievous mistreatment, had been whipped and beaten and had led a lonely and desperate existence. People simply did not believe that a Christian white woman had gone along with it voluntarily. One paper, the Clarksville Northern Standard, observed later that “her body and arms bear the marks of having been cruelly treated.”³⁰ Yet there is nothing to suggest that she was cruelly treated after the first few days of her captivity, as her cousin Rachel Plummer had described them. She was the ward of a chief, later his wife. The scars may have resulted from the practice among Comanche women of cutting themselves in mourning, often on the arms and breasts. Apparently no white people wanted to think too hard about the implications of the lovely mixed-race girl named Prairie Flower, whom her mother obviously adored.
After the carnival interlude in town, the party continued to Birdville. Here Isaac lived in a spacious “double log” cabin that was considered for many years the finest house in Tarrant County. It is not clear exactly what he thought he was going to accomplish with Cynthia Ann and her daughter. Perhaps he was simply doing what he considered to be his family duty. Perhaps he saw himself as her deliverer, imagining the day when Cynthia Ann, grateful and weeping, would embrace Jesus and forsake her savage ways.
Nothing of the sort happened. Cynthia Ann’s repatriation was in fact a disaster. She was not only unrepentant. She was actively, and incessantly, hostile to her captors. She tried repeatedly to escape with her daughter, sometimes making it far into the woods and requiring a search party to find her. She was so intent on leaving that Isaac had to lock her in the house when he was away. As her legal guardian, he was empowered to do so. Cynthia Ann was being treated as though she were crazy: An entirely “free” white woman, thirty-three years old and from a prominent family, was being forcibly restrained so that she could not return to her sons and the culture that raised her. Her family believed that, owing to a life in which they assumed she had been sexually abused and beaten and enslaved, she was unable to know what was best for her. Cynthia Ann, meanwhile, always had a clear and quite correct sense of her own interests. Such treatment must have been terrible to endure.
She could not, or would not, speak English, though in any case what she remembered would have been rudimentary. She would sit for hours and hours on the wide porch of Isaac’s house weeping and nursing Prairie Flower. She refused to stop her pagan devotions. One of her relatives described her ritual of worship:
She went out to a smooth place on the ground, cleaned it off very nicely and made a circle and a cross. On the cross she built a fire, burned some tobacco, and then cut a place on her breast and let the blood drop onto the fire. She then lit her pipe and blowed smoke toward the sun and assumed an attitude of the most sincere devotion. She afterwards said through an interpreter that this was her prayer to her great spirit to enable her to understand and appreciate that these were her relatives and kindred she was among.³¹
The family and neighbors retaliated by demanding that Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower give up wearing Indian clothing and insisting that Prairie Flower be given instruction in Scripture.³² Cynthia Ann was uncooperative. Things did not go well.
In late January 1861, a little more than a month after the Pease River fight, Isaac Parker took his charges to Austin to try to convince the Texas legislature to give them a pension—a sort of compensation for the hardships they had endured. This was a clever idea, but would require a good deal of political grease, and he was exactly the sort of man who could pull it off. As a lifelong politician and elected official, Isaac knew everyone in the capital. He and Sam Houston, then governor of Texas, were old friends. They had fought together in the War of 1812. Later, Houston had sent Isaac as an emissary to Washington to gather support for the Texas revolution.
The Parkers arrived in Austin on a chilly January day to find the city firmly in the grip of secession fever. Abraham Lincoln had been elected president the previous fall, and anti-Union sentiment in Texas was in full cry. Austin was its center. Throughout the month of January secessionists marched up and down the rutted dirt of Congress Avenue, the city’s broad main street that was newly lined with sturdy limestone buildings. It climbed gently from the Colorado River toward the imposing new three-story domed state capitol, which was fronted by marble Ionic columns and a huge portico. The secessionists were in their glory. They were an unruly bunch, carrying torches and signs that condemned Lincoln and his “abolitionist” government. They held parades and marches on a moment’s notice. One featured a loud brass band, a long line of carriages containing ladies who fluttered Texas flags, and a boisterous contingent of men on horseback, all led by Ranger Rip Ford, who pranced down the avenue on a white stallion.³³ Texas flags flew everywhere, and there was even talk of a second republic. The air was cold and bracing, and Texans were in a high mood.
The secession convention, which began on January 28, featured an Olympian fight between Governor Houston, who opposed breaking away from the United States, and almost everyone else, who favored it. The old statesman delivered one of the greatest speeches of his career, pleading that “it is not unmanly to pause and at least endeavor to avert the calamity.” People listened respectfully to him. And then voted 171–6 in favor of secession.³⁴ That took place on February 1, 1861. On April 12, Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, signaling the start of the Civil War.
Into one of these volatile debates came Cynthia Ann Parker, cleaned up and dressed nicely by two prominent Austin women who had taken a special interest in her. They were showing her the splendors of the white man’s world. She entered through the massive portico and climbed the stone steps to the gallery on the second floor where she sat and listened to men debate an issue she could not possibly have comprehended in a language she did not remember. Still, she became visibly agitated. She took up her daughter and ran for the door. After she was tackled and brought back—she was always being tackled and brought back in those days—it occurred to her companions that she believed the men on the floor of the legislature were sitting in judgment of her. She thought they were deciding whether or not to put her to death.³⁵
Here, too, Cynthia Ann and her daughter were objects of great curiosity. She was “visited by very many,” reported one newspaper, which meant that crowds of people came and stared at her. She was visibly distraught. She spoke sparely and only through an interpreter. At one point she stated that she was surprised to discover that the Comanches were not, as she had supposed, the “most numerous and powerful people in the world.”³⁶ Or at least that is what one newspaper reporter heard. While in Austin she sat for a “tintype”—an early type of photograph. The resulting image shows a woman who has clearly been gussied up, though she looks deeply uncomfortable in her new clothes. Her hair is pulled back in what looks like some sort of net. She wears a patterned cotton blouse and a striped skirt and what looks to be a woolen robe clasped at the neck. Her unusually large and work-scarred hands are crossed on her lap. Her gaze is direct, supplicating, and utterly miserable.³⁷
Her misery notwithstanding, Isaac’s plan worked. Two months after their visit, the Texas legislature voted to grant Cynthia Ann a $100-a-year pension for five years, plus a league of land (4,428 acres). Here, too, she was treated as a special case. The money and land were not to come to her but to be held in trust for her by her cousins Isaac Duke Parker and Benjamin Parker, as though they were the guardians of a minor—or of a mentally infirm adult who was unable to speak for herself.³⁸
Back in Birdville, Cynthia Ann continued to be disconsolate living at her uncle Silas’s house. She wept; she tried to escape; she refused to cooperate. Nothing changed. And so, in the hope that she might find greater happiness elsewhere and perhaps also to get her out of Isaac’s hair, she began a long and strange odyssey through the homes of various relatives that had the ultimate effect of taking her deeper and deeper into east Texas, farther and farther from the Great Plains, and thus from any hope that she could ever be reunited with her people.
- • •
The first stop on this journey was the oddest of all. Hearing of her unhappiness with Isaac, Cynthia Ann’s cousin William Parker and his wife, who lived two miles south of Isaac, had volunteered to take her in. His generosity seemed innocent enough. But William, as it turned out, was not acting out of charity. He had a very specific and entirely self-serving reason for inviting Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower to his home.
Shortly after Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower moved, cousin William sent a letter to a Texan named Coho Smith. Coho’s real name was John Jeremiah Smith. His nickname came as the result of being wounded by a lance. Cojo in Spanish means “lame.” He was one of those marginal, colorful characters who inhabited the Texas frontier in its early days. He recorded his adventures in a book of his own drawings and observations he dubbed his “Cohographs.” He was self-educated and fluent in a number of languages, including Comanche. As a boy, he had spent a year as a Comanche captive. At the time he received Parker’s letter, sometime in late 1861, he was working as a Confederate cotton agent, though he had also worked as a teacher and cabinetmaker. In the letter Parker explained that Cynthia Ann had come to live with him and begged Smith to come to his house—a distance of 189 miles—to act as translator. He said that he and his wife were anxious to have a conversation with their new guest, who could not speak English. For whatever reason, Smith agreed and soon arrived at the Parker place. When he asked where Cynthia Ann was, Parker replied, “I saw her go out the gate about half an hour ago. Let us go and hunt her up. She is generally moping around here in these woods.”³⁹ They found her a hundred yards from the house, sitting on a log with “her elbows on her knees and her hands to her face.” She wore an old sun bonnet. Prairie Flower was playing on the ground. She had constructed a small corral of sticks and was talking to herself in Comanche. William indicated to his cousin that dinner was ready by putting his hand in his mouth. Cynthia Ann shot a sharp, disapproving glance at Smith, then began to follow them back to the house. His wife explained to Smith that “so many people came to see her that it annoyed her. That is why she looked at you so spitefully.” She was still a figure of curiosity, still being gawked at.
Back at the house, Smith spoke to her in Comanche. “Ee-wunee keem,” he said, which meant “come here.” According to Smith, her reaction was immediate and almost violent. “She sprang with a scream and knocked about half the dishes off the table, scaring Mr. Parker. . . . She ran around to me and fell on the floor and caught me around both ankles, crying in Comanche ‘Ee-ma mi mearo,’ meaning ‘I am going with you.’ ”
Now she came fully alive. Sitting on a chair next to Smith, she held him by one arm “talking all the time to me in Comanche and Spanish, mixing the two languages all the time.” Her Spanish was surprisingly good. She would not eat, but kept talking instead. “Oh, don’t eat,” she said in Comanche. “Let us talk. Oh my friend, do let us talk.”
Then she switched to Spanish, and said something that did not make any sense. “I want to go back to my two boys and Billy there has told me by signs that he wants to go to my people also. I said: ‘Billy, do you want to go to the Comanches?’ He said ‘Yes, I do. And that is why I sent for you to interpret, for it is this way.’”
Perplexed, Smith then asked William Parker what she meant. Parker, at length, explained. He told Smith that he had served in the Confederate Army. A union bullet had shattered his thighbone and had partly crippled him. He was not crippled enough, however, to avoid being sent back to the war by the conscription officers he called “dad-blasted heel flies.” The prospect terrified him, as did the notion of being hanged or shot as a deserter. Like thousands of other young men in the Confederate states, Parker had rushed to the recruiting posts in 1861 in anticipation of a brief and glorious war. Now he wanted out. He was desperate.
And he had a plan. “I want you to take me and Cynthia Ann to the Comanches,” he told Smith. “I can stay with them until this cruel war is over.”
The idea was absurd, as though he conceived of the Comanche tribe as a sort of rooming house where he could stay for a few years. Somehow Cynthia Ann had been able to grasp this idea clearly and to comprehend that Smith had been summoned for this reason. The two Parker relatives had obviously found a way to communicate.
Smith, who had no interest in such a venture—for which he, too, could be hanged—offered the weak excuse that there were no horses available. “Horses,” Cynthia Ann exclaimed, “that is nothing! There is some first-rate horses running here . . . don’t hesitate a moment about the horses. Oh, I tell you, mi Corazon estan llorando todo el tiempo por mis dos hijos. [My heart is crying all the time for my two sons.]” Then, switching back to Comanche, she said: “En-se-ca-sok bu-ku-ne-suwa? [Do you want a heap of horses?]” Then again in Spanish: “No mas lleba mi.” [Only take me.] She offered Smith all the girls or wives he wanted. She offered ten guns, ten horses, ten wives. Cynthia Ann’s harangue, Smith wrote, continued into the early-morning hours.
When Smith asked why she and “Billy” could not go by themselves, she answered that she thought he would be killed and she would be made a slave. She had an idea that Coho was tougher than William Parker, the cripple and coward. She was probably right. And of course Smith spoke the Comanche language. The next day Parker took Smith out to see his illegal still, which he had built following the directions in a book entitled One Thousand Things Worth Knowing, then made one last effort to convince him to help, offering Smith the deed to more than half of his eighty acres. “They will never get me in the army again,” he said. “I will suicide first.” Smith again refused. He later heard that Parker had managed to find his way to Illinois anyway, and had thus escaped the war. The last thing Smith remembered Cynthia Ann saying was: “Si le doy o mi gene si le doy, todos las muchachas que si quire, pero bonito y buen mosas. [I will give you, or my people will give you, all the girls you want, but pretty and well made].” He refused that, too. It must have broken her heart.
- • •
Coho Smith captured Cynthia Ann as no one else has. Other people saw her as sullen, brooding, unresponsive, detached. Despondent. Even crazy, or at least so far sunk in savagery as to be irredeemable. In Smith’s account she was smart, aggressive, focused, strong-willed, and intensely practical. She was completely aware of what she wanted and, at least for that brief moment, of how to get it. Her tragedy was that such a woman was utterly helpless to change the destiny that her family had, with the best of intentions, arranged for her.
In early 1862, Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower moved yet again, this time to the home of her younger brother, Silas Jr. He had also been at the fort when it was raided, along with his three siblings. For some reason the Indians had taken Cynthia Ann and John and had spared Silas Jr. and Orlena. Silas and his wife, Ann, lived with their three children in Van Zandt County, deep in the piney woods of east Texas, twenty-seven miles northwest of Tyler. If Cynthia Ann had despaired of getting back home when she was living in Birdville, she was now more than a hundred miles east. She was no longer even near the frontier. She must have understood this as they traveled: She was leaving the prairies, heading for the high timber. She must have known she was never getting out.
Life was no better with Silas, who was twenty-eight at the time and stuttered. She did not get along with his wife, who punished Prairie Flower (who was often called Topsannah or Tecks Ann) every time she called her mother by her Comanche name.⁴⁰ Cynthia Ann kept trying to escape, walking off down the road with her daughter in her arms whenever she was left alone. (She said she was “going home, just going home.”)⁴¹ She often slashed her arms and breasts with a knife, drawing blood. This was probably an act of mourning for the death of her husband. Or it could have been a simple expression of misery. On one occasion she took a butcher knife and cut off her hair.
It was around this time that a photograph was taken of Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower that would become famous on the frontier and beyond. They had gone “visiting” in Fort Worth in the company of Silas—probably dragged along so she would not escape—and had somehow, perhaps at Silas’s urging, landed in the photography studio of a man named A. F. Corning.⁴² The result was an exceptional and luminous portrait of mother and daughter. In it, Cynthia Ann wears a plain cotton blouse with a kerchief tied loosely at the neck. Her board-straight, medium brown hair is cropped short (perhaps this was the result of the butcher knife incident). Her eyes are light and transparent, her gaze disarmingly direct. Again we see the large, muscular hands and thick wrists. What is most extraordinary about the portrait, however, is Cynthia Ann’s exposed right breast, at which the black-haired, swaddled, and obviously quite pretty Prairie Flower is nursing. There is probably no precedent for this sort of photography on the Texas frontier in 1862. White women were not photographed with their breasts exposed. And even if a photographer had taken such a photo, no newspaper would have published it. This one was different. It became the picture of Cynthia Ann that generations of schoolchildren knew; it is still in wide circulation. The only explanation is that because Cynthia Ann was seen, and treated, as a savage, even though she was as white as any Scots-Irish settler in the south. The double standard is similar to the one National Geographic Magazine famously applied in the mid-twentieth century to photographs of naked African women. The magazine would never have considered showing the breasts of a white woman in its pages. This explains part of the fascination with Cynthia Ann: the sense that, though her skin was white, something darker and more primal lurked beneath. In April 1862, Silas joined the Confederate army, leaving his pregnant wife to care for their three children and also to act as jailer for Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower.⁴³ Ann soon put a stop to it, and Cynthia Ann and Prairie Flower were shipped off yet again, this time to her sister Orlena, who also lived in the vicinity of Tyler, with her husband J. R. O’Quinn. Mother and daughter were moved to a separate house.⁴⁴
Now, perhaps because of her growing realization that she was never going back to the Comanches, Cynthia Ann began to adjust. The Civil War had taken most of the able-bodied men, leaving the women to pick up the slack. Cynthia Ann began to relearn English, and, in one account, could eventually speak it when she wanted to. She learned how to spin, weave, and sew and became quite adept at it. Her Comanche experience had taught her how to tan hides, and she became known as the best tanner in the county. According to a neighbor:
She was stout and weighed about 140 pounds, well made, and liked to work. She had a wild expression and would look down when people looked at her. She could use an axe equal to a man and disliked a lazy person. She was an expert in tanning hides with the hair on them, or plaiting or knitting either ropes or whips. She thought her two boys were lost on the prairie . . . this dissatisfied her very much.⁴⁵
Part of this adjustment, too, was her reintegration into the Parker family. Many of her relatives lived nearby, and she saw them with some regularity. She had friends, too, in a sense, at least people she could talk to. She even remembered some of the people from the old days. Every Sunday one of them would take Prairie Flower visiting. The child had learned English quickly and soon spoke it more often than Comanche.⁴⁶ She even went to a nearby school. In the account of Cynthia Ann’s relative Tom Champion, she had a “sunny disposition” and was “an open-hearted, good woman, and always ready to help somebody.”⁴⁷ Most others had a different view. She was seen weeping on the porch, or hiding herself from gawkers, who never stopped coming to see the infamous “white squaw.” And there was nothing sunny about her refusal to abandon many of her Indian ways, slicing her body with a knife whenever a family member died, and singing her high-pitched, keening songs of Comanche mourning. She had never forgotten, she had only accommodated; she probably stopped believing the Parker family’s promises, which they repeated to the end, that she would be allowed to see her sons again. They had always been empty promises. According to T. J. Cates, one of Cynthia Ann’s neighbors, she spoke often of the loss of her two sons.
I well remember Cynthia Ann Parker and her little Taocks [sic]. She lived at this time about six miles south of [the town of] Ben Wheeler with her brother-in-law Ruff O’Quinn, near Slater’s Creek. . . . She thought her two boys were lost on the prairie after she was captured. . . . She would take a knife and hack at her breast until it would bleed and then put the blood on some tobacco and cry for her lost boys.⁴⁸
Champion had the same impression. “I don’t think she ever knew but that her sons were killed,” he wrote. “And to hear her tell of the happy days of the Indian dances and see the excitement and pure joy which shown [sic] on her face, the memory of it, I am convinced that the white people did more harm by keeping her away from them than the Indians did by taking her at first.”⁴⁹
Whatever chance she may have had at contentment was destroyed in 1864 when Prairie Flower died of influenza and pneumonia.⁵⁰ The little girl’s death shattered her. Now there was nothing left of her Comanche life but memories. What her day-to-day life was like in the years after that is largely unknown. The Comanche version is unambiguous: The white men broke her spirit and made her a misfit. She became bitter over her enforced captivity, refused to eat, and eventually starved herself to death.⁵¹ She lived six more years, until 1870, when she died of influenza, which may well have been complicated by self-starvation. A coffin was built for her by relatives; a bone pin was put in her hair, and they buried her in the Foster Cemetery, four miles south of the town of Poyner, which lies between the larger towns of Tyler and Palestine. It is perhaps fitting for someone who had endured so many changes against her will that, before she came to her final resting place, she was buried three times, in three different cemeteries.
Who was she, in the end? A white woman by birth, yes, but also a relic of old Comancheria, of the fading empire of high grass and fat summer moons and buffalo herds that blackened the horizon. She had seen all of that death and glory. She had been a chief’s wife. She had lived free on the high infinite plains as her adopted race had in the very last place in the North American continent where anyone would ever live or run free. She had died in deep pine woods where there was no horizon, where you could see nothing at all. The woods were just a prison. As far as we know, she died without the slightest comprehension of what larger forces had conspired to take her away from her old life.
One thinks of Cynthia Ann on the immensity of the plains, a small figure in buckskin bending to her chores by a diamond-clear stream. It is late autumn, the end of warring and buffalo hunting. Above her looms a single cottonwood tree, gone bright yellow in the season, its leaves and branches framing a deep blue sky. Maybe she lifts her head to see the children and dogs playing in the prairie grass and, beyond them, the coils of smoke rising into the gathering twilight from a hundred lodge fires. And maybe she thinks, just for a moment, that all is right in the world.
